


Hellblazer: Your Number is My Number

by Tlon



Category: Hellblazer, Hellblazer & Related Fandoms
Genre: Anechoic Chambers, Bondage, Branding, Completely Handwaving Magic, F/M, Humiliation, Hurt/Comfort, Improbably Well-Pressed Suits, M/M, Mind Control, Psychological Torture, Pulp Science Fiction, Revenge, Sexual Slavery
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-10
Updated: 2016-03-03
Packaged: 2018-05-19 11:25:36
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 12
Words: 19,225
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5965600
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tlon/pseuds/Tlon
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>One day, everybody's luck runs out. Everybody finds a friend whose love has turned to loathing, or gets tangled in a world they thought they could wrap around their finger. Everybody suffers. Everybody's number comes up. But not everyone has lived so large that when they fall, the depths are almost unimaginable. Not everyone is John Constantine.</p><p>In fact, practically no one is.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Red Martinis

**Author's Note:**

> Just to start out: the character and (minimal) canon for this piece are based on the original comic, not the TV series or later reboots. It probably fits stylistically most with Jamie Delano or Garth Ennis' runs - the gratuitously dark parts of them, at least. I... I'm gonna repeat "gratutiously dark" here, just for safety. Maybe just "gratuitous," period. Gratuitously angsty, gratuitously sexual, gratuitously peppered with made-up books about post-apocalyptic girl gangs. I guess I just hope someone, somewhere likes that sort of thing?

Laura is starting to regret taking up Benny's offer of a couch in London. It's only a couple of weeks, and she'd figured it would be fun. The shopping, he promised, and the nightclubs. Real ancient history, not the American excuse for it. So far, he's been about on point with that, and she's wasted too much money trying to look like a zaftig Emma Peele in bright solid colors and thick cotton cut in faux-dangerous military styles. But her amusement at seeing him run some silly fetish club – which he's mentioned off and on over the past year – is turning to boredom.

Laura only knows Benny because, at some point before he crossed the Atlantic, she tried to get his roommate into bed. The boy was out of her league – olive skin, shiny brown hair, lashes so thick he looked perpetually made-up. By the time she'd figured that out, though, she and Benny had bonded over terrible cocktails and worse movies, and she was left with a slightly uneasy friendship that depended on a combination of shared interests and carefully maintained distance. She wouldn't tell Benny if somebody broke her heart, because he'd probably make fun of her. But she'd split a bottle or two of wine with him any night.

A sex club is the kind of thing she and Benny would joke about owning, and gawking at it is one of the reasons she came in the first place, but now that she's here, it's just tacky. Everybody's obsessed with proving how tough they are and how much black leather they can afford. They have uncomfortable-looking masks and little chains that clack when they walk, which almost sets Laura laughing before she can force her face back into its solemn facade. Benny is saying something about hot wax and needles; when he repeats it, it becomes clear he was asking a question. Laura demurs.

“Well, what do you want to see?” he asks.

“I don't know,” she says. “I'd... well, it's just all so choreographed. Let's go back and have some of those little red martini things.”

Benny stops and turns, then walks a couple of steps, then stops and turns again and heads back the way he was going before. “If you don't want choreographed,” he says, “I've got something secret to show you.” His voice conveys a mixture of genuine pride and fear, which doesn't make any sense given what she's seen so far. But whatever it is, it's down a flight of stairs and through a stone hallway that somehow manages to be laughable even though it's apparently part of the original architecture.

“The salon,” he says with a flourish. It's a little library-looking room, nicer than anything upstairs but still empty. “So what's in here?” she asks. Benny shakes his head. “No, not in here,” he says. “But we're going the right way.”

There's another hall, some side doors, and then they come to what must be the final location, where Benny knocks loudly, ironically. Laura hears no answer, but he opens the door and they step inside.

She marvels at the whole place's scattershot design. Nothing in this entire building matches, because now she's through to some kind of large, windowless cell, like Benny has imported a Trappist monk. It's clean and almost entirely empty, just a low table and some benches, though she's primed enough by the rest of the club to notice rings on the walls and floor. To the side, doors indicate more rooms, and it's one of these that Benny opens. He winks at her, but once again, it's forced. “I'll be right back.” Laura looks around anxiously, but the door behind her is unlocked when she tests it – rings aside, Benny doesn't seem worried about anyone or anything escaping.

When Benny comes back, she can't help but be disappointed. He's followed by a good-looking but otherwise ordinary man, blond and dressed in a slim navy suit that's probably the most tasteful thing she's seen since she got here. Obviously she's not sure what she'd hoped Benny had in mind, but she at least expected it to be more shocking than this. Then, for a second, their eyes meet, and she decides no, he's not ordinary. He looks as if he hates her, Benny, something more than she thought a human could. It's only for a second, though, before he looks at the floor again, avoiding her gaze.

“So, who are you?” she asks, almost frightened. The man doesn't answer; Benny does.

“This,” he says, “is our bona fide magician.”

“A magician? Scarves and hats?” Laura tries to sound amused and skeptical, addressing the man again. He still says nothing, and Benny laughs too hard, putting an arm around him. It looks like a friendly and mildly avuncular gesture – _chummy_ , she'd probably say if she were from around here. The man's face betrays nothing, though, and he almost imperceptibly draws away from Benny.

“No,” says Benny. “The real thing. Curses and magic circles and devils – probably some scarves and hats too, I guess. Anything you imagined when you pulled out the Ouija board at a sleepover, you know? He's done it.”

The whole thing is so over-the-top. She's standing in the Shaker-inspired basement of a London sex club dressed like a mod assassin, carefully talking past a man who apparently does party tricks and clearly wants them to go away. Even if it's confusing and awkward, it beats going back to the _Heavy Metal_ poseurs upstairs by a long shot.

“And what are you... I mean what is he... doing here? Do you rent out the room or something?”

Benny gives a token laugh this time, as if to express that he knows her remark is supposed to be witty but doesn't want to let her think she's bested him for cleverness. She might push back normally, but right now, he's earned some leeway.

“Well, that's what's funny. He was here when we bought the place.” He pauses to take in the look on her face. “Like they owned him.”

Laura nods slowly. She can usually recognize one of Benny's jokes, but she's also met enough 24/7 submissives to suspect she's getting roped into some elaborate fantasy. “Owned him, huh? I guess the white slave trade's picking up.” She's needling him a little – damned if she's going to get suckered into being an extra on somebody's erotic set. “I thought wizarding rent boys were usually a little younger.” She tries to catch the man's eye, and as she does, she realizes he's not all that old, really.

“No, I mean, he's... people want to meet him,” says Benny. “He's some magician named John Constantine, and half the rich weirdos in the city must have a budget line with his name on it.”

“You got a fag?” Laura almost jumps as the man – John – speaks. He doesn't repeat himself, and even those four words are delivered with an odd, weary resignation. She's fumbling out an apology for not smoking when Benny cuts in. “You know we can't. Nothing's free.” He doesn't repeat himself either, just turns back to her. “We don't even do much. He's got some woman managing all the upkeep, dictating the terms, so on, for him. We practically just collect on the money.”

“Well, this was fun,” she says before he can start making up booking details. “Next time you're going to bring me in on somebody's S&M dungeon vacation, at last give me a heads-up so I can dress better.”

Benny looks so hurt – by his standards, anyhow – that she almost feels bad. “Come on. I wouldn't make something this weird up. Well – maybe I would, but not to you. I swear.” He looks at John, who doesn't even seem to notice they're there.

“Hey,” Benny says. John starts. “Let's get you that cigarette. Right now.”

“I don't need one.” John's voice is still blank and tired, but it carries a hint of hesitation. “You can come back later.” Benny shakes his head and puts his arm up again, this time pulling John closer. “No,” he says. “Now.”

Laura doesn't interrupt, even if she doesn't like or fully understand the tone in Benny's voice. John is still entirely impassive; for a moment he doesn't seem to have heard, but Benny nods and, slowly, he kneels in his nice blue suit, eyes down. And then, Benny unzips his pants – trousers – and slides his hand down his boxers. Well, look, Laura thinks, they are in a sex club. He can't shock her with this. Girls probably pay to watch this stuff, and this John Constantine, with his dramatic name, has to be shelling out big for the dungeon. Benny's the one really making it out free. His eyes are half-closed now, and he's slipping his boxers down, John still not watching. He barely reacts when Benny puts a hand on the back of his head and pulls him forward, letting his mouth open and his eyes focus on nothing.

Good-looking doesn't really get it right, because he's more than that. Blue-eyed blondes usually look elfin or affable, but he's sharp, like a fox – he doesn't belong here, no matter what brought him, doesn't belong here with Benny's cock in his mouth, deep in some kind of headspace she always hears about from subs, she guesses. He moves only when Benny reminds him to with mild exasperation, and even then he looks far away. She almost envies it, although she envies more the fact that he's better-dressed and prettier than she is. Normally that kind of envy turns into desire, and she can't say she's not feeling that as she watches him close his eyes with Benny's fingers through his hair. It's just that, for one thing, she can't precisely get Benny out of the picture here, and even if she could, she's not going to pay or be paid for sex.

Benny moans and pulls John's hair until he cries out, the first moment he's seemed present the entire time. Maybe Benny likes that, because he comes a couple of moments later, pulling out and fumbling in his pockets as he pulls up his pants. He knocks a cigarette out of the pack and cups John's chin, forcing him to look up. “Here,” he says, sliding the filter between John's lips. “Want a light?”

Laura watches with increasing discomfort. It's all too serious for her taste, too real, if you can say that about anything here. John doesn't get up and crack a joke, and Benny doesn't comfort him or talk to him at all. He just lights the cigarette and watches as John lifts his fingers to it slowly. He doesn't even get off his knees.

“Come on,” says Benny. “Martinis.”

“What the fuck was that?” she asks Benny in the hall outside.

“You said you didn't want choreographed.”

“Sure, but I didn't want that creepshow there. What the hell is he, anyways? How long as he been paying rent down there?”

Benny stops in the little salon and sits down, looking as if she's not understanding some simple concept. “I told you, he's a magician. And I also told you, he was here when I got the place. Some kind of... old retainer, well, not old exactly, but you know what I mean.” He waves his hand. “And he's usually more, well, responsive. Lots of repeat clients.”

Laura nods. The tackiness of the club upstairs has been replaced by something darker. Whatever it is, she wants to stay as far away from it as possible. “Okay,” she says. “Come on, I need a drink.”


	2. The Brand

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _“You're the kind of person who gets people hurt and doesn't even realize it. And no matter how much you try, you're going to do it again and again.”_

John can always tell when Rose is coming by the way his brand hurts. He doesn't know if it's a sympathetic response to her magic or something she put in just to torture him a little more, but it doesn't matter when he's clutching his shoulder, sick with pain. By the time she finally walks in and it stops, he's shaking.

“It's been a long time, Johnny,” she says. Her tall hat is cocked back on her head like always, black curls underneath it, cane resting by the table ready to support her ruined leg. “Do you know how long?”

He shakes his head.

“You know how long it's been since my first visit?”

Here it is, then. John grits his teeth. “No.” He used to try, in his windowless prison, counting every time he slept or ate. He was losing the thread even before they started putting him under, or keeping him awake for what felt like days. And that's just the way she likes it.

“But you've met the new owner. That's what he tells me. You know what else he tells me?” She doesn't wait for an answer this time. “That you haven't been... _nice_ to him.”

He laughs. “You came all the way out to make me apologize?”

She laughs along with him, keeps laughing just a little too long after he's stopped. To make everything worse, it's not a malicious laugh. No, it's the one he used to hear when he said something funny over dinner or pretended to paw at her when they kissed on the bridge looking out over the river what feels like a very, very long time ago. Not the way she sounded in Berlin, when he thought he'd lost her during the seance. Not the way she sounded in Glasgow when she found him again. She'd been cold and furious then, or at least that's the way he remembers it, since everything hurt too much to be sure. Every new thing she and the others did to him seemed like the worst it could get – he was stoic as they hit him, and could at least bear it when they scourged the skin all down his back. But then she had come close and whispered in his ear: _Why did you leave me?_

Because I couldn't have saved you, he wanted to reply. Because I didn't even know you were still alive, not after the circle broke. Because I was barely in this reality anyways. He didn't say any of them. _Whatever happens to you now. Whatever happens to you, just remember. It's your fault._ When they tied him down and she pressed the heated brand to his skin, he screamed, hating her more than he thought possible. He would never believe it was his fault, he thought, when she knelt and looked into his eyes, as beautiful as he'd ever seen her through the haze of pain and the tears he barely managed to keep back. _Fair trade_ , she said. _Magic could have saved my leg. So it's not as if you were using it._

Fair trade, he thinks. Fair trade that she keeps him here like a pet, fair trade that she sells him, fair trade that she comes back just to remind him of what he's lost.

No, not just to remind him.

“You're still funny,” she tells him, one finger in her curls. “Have you met Arthur yet? He's funny, too.” She taps her cane sharply, and her latest bodyguard opens the door. He hasn't met Arthur, but he's met a whole string of them, all wiry capoeira fighter types with shaggy hair. With what he's seen of Rose's powers, they're also entirely unnecessary. Arthur, at least, looks as if he knows the score.

“This is Johnny, Arthur,” she says in a kind of stage voice. That's the cue, the start of the script. Arthur walks up as if to shake his hand but hits him hard in the stomach instead, and soon he's on the ground, gasping and trying to pull free. He's weak, though, and all Arthur does is pin him on his stomach, face pressed to the ground. Arthur reaches for the front of John's suit jacket and pulls it open, buttons tearing away and clattering on the floor. “No,” he says, talking more about the jacket than anything else. “No, no don't.”

Rose ignores him, and Arthur does the same to his shirt, tearing it open and tugging until it and his jacket are lying on the floor beside him, Arthur's hot hands on his back. John can barely move, but when Arthur reaches for his trousers, he struggles as hard as he can.

“Please,” he says, “Please, please jesus Rose.” She looks at him this time but says nothing, and Arthur tears the rest of his clothing off, one palm between John's shoulder blades. He must be looking at the brand now, wondering what it means. “Christ, I promise, Rose, whatever you want...”

Sometimes she tells her boys to go through with it. If she does now, Arthur will force his legs open and Rose will watch as he tries to forget his body exists – he'll never be able to do it completely, will always feel the fingers digging into his hips and the way she's looking at him, predatory. Maybe she'll reconsider if he begs enough, like she sometimes does. But she looks at Arthur instead. “You'll be more comfortable in the bedroom,” she says matter-of-factly.

That's kindness from her. Arthur pulls him up by his hair and he stumbles through the door. Arthur doesn't get as far as the bed, just puts a boot behind John's knees and pushes him to the ground, one hand around his throat. Now John doesn't bother to fight it, because there's no point – Rose has made up her mind, and anything more he does will only make it worse.

Arthur fucks him hard and painfully against the flagstone, John's skin scraping the floor as he's held in place. All he can do is not give Arthur or Rose the satisfaction of hearing him cry out, not then and not when Arthur finishes and hits him again and again, everywhere but the face, never the face, Rose tells them. As Arthur pulls his clothes on, Rose opens the door, graceful even with her cane, and perches on the bed. She gives Arthur a knowing smile and he sees himself out, leaving her looking down at John.

“Johnny,” she says. “Does it hurt?”

He wants to spit at her, but his exhaustion and agony takes all the fight out of him. “Yes,” he says. “When are you going to have had enough revenge? I don't even,” he has to stop his voice from breaking, “I can't do magic, no matter where I am. I don't even know what month it is. Rose, I've got nowhere to go, nothing to do.”

She motions for him to join her on the bed, and he does so, hesitating whenever one of his newly forming bruises touches the floor or furniture. She helps him the last few inches and lies beside him, hat on the floor, moving his shoulders so his head rests on her ribs. “I don't know,” she says. “I don't. It isn't revenge, or I mean not just revenge. It's that... you're dangerous. It's not a question of magic or of status or money or any of that. It's who you are.”

“That's not –”

She cuts him off. “You're the kind of person who gets people hurt and doesn't even realize it. And no matter how much you try, you're going to do it again and again.”

Rose takes a deep breath that John can feel all through his skull. She's shaking like she always did – does – when she gets angry, almost like the old days when they would argue late at night in bed. It ought to feel like that again when she wraps an arm around him and pulls him up to kiss her, or when she starts unbuttoning her blouse and slides his hand onto her breast. But she hates him now, and she has him trapped and his whole body hurts, and if he tries to turn away, she'll pull him back or call Arthur or do worse than that. She'll make him want it.

So he kisses her back and helps her out of her skirt and tries to avoid looking her in the eye, flinching when she pushes his head down and he strokes her thighs and hopes it will all be over quickly. Rose shudders with pleasure as he licks her, and maybe it will be enough, maybe she won't want anything more from him.

After everything, John can still remember the first time she had him, after they met again. All his injuries had been bandaged but fresh, the cuts and lash marks and the brand. He hadn't been thinking clearly but he remembers laying on his side, rope twisted around his wrists and looped through the slats on a radiator. Something must have been broken though, because the room was freezing. His back still burned, but his feet had gone numb, and his hands only had feeling because he'd been rubbing his wrists raw trying to get them loose. Even then, though, he'd still thought the worst they would do was hold him for a few days and leave him to make it out on his own.

The door opened behind him. He ignored it. Careful steps, three at a time: _tap_ tap tap, _tap_ tap tap. Hard metal, a weight on his shoulder.

Rose pushed him onto his back with her heavy false leg. He closed his eyes and rode through the first shock, steadying his breathing and trying not to think about the fresh blood soaking his bandages. He waited for her to gloat or shout or cry, but she only looked down at him.

The brand was making it hard to read her, he realized. He'd thought it a bit of a joke before, a piece of showmanship. Magic was practical, not some genetic condition you could take away. But something felt deadened – his intuition, maybe. “I'd think you'd know after all this time, love. I don't have a foot fetish, let alone a peg-leg one.”

He braced for a kick that never came. Instead, Rose knelt. Her dress was green, soft and fitted, a lot of pointless zips on the front and a real one down the side. He remembers this now as perfectly as he does everything else. He remembers how she touched his chest and worked her way down to the button on his trousers while the low-level hum of pain continued in the back of his mind.

“What are you – ” she didn't answer as she eased off his clothes, until he was naked under her gaze. It should have been familiar. The way she was looking at him, though, was the way you'd examine a particularly interesting spider before you crushed it. He wondered how she would hurt him next.

She held the fabric of her dress with one hand and pulled the zipper down.

“Look, I'm flattered but -”

She still didn't answer. In a moment she had climbed on top of him, and he didn't know why it made his heart beat fast with fear or his breath stop.

Rose ran a finger along his ribs. He shivered. She didn't say a word to him, didn't even look at him. The feeling only got worse when she kneaded the flesh of his hip, when he felt her hand slide between his legs, around his scrotum. He arched his back, trying to throw her off, but she put her weight on his chest and pushed him down, setting all his wounds on fire again. John stifled a cry. She had her hand on his cock now, and as the pain passed, he realized that he was responding to her attention. That he couldn't help it.

He looked up at her. How many times had they done this on the bed in her flat, just before the sun came up? Her eyes met his, with nothing in them but contempt. He started to ask her to stop, but before he got the words out he knew what the answer would be, and he didn't want to hear it. It would only make this worse. As she slid onto him, she leaned down and bit his neck, reached a hand up to touch his bound wrists and make him flinch.

He stared at the ceiling above her. It felt good, that was the worst part – she could make him sob with agony one minute and then have him on his back and inside her the next. She could do anything she wanted to him. “Please...” he whispered, but part of him was afraid that if he finished the thought, he wouldn't be asking her to stop.

Rose sped up and he realized that he still recognized her rhythm, knew what was happening even before she moaned and squeezed her legs tight around him. She pulled away, leaving him hard and somehow even more aware of how much he was at her mercy.

“Why?” he asked as she zipped up her dress.

She stood and looked down at him. “Because you're a whore, Johnny. I doubt you waited a week before giving up and going on to the next girl. I might as well make the most of it.”

He closed his eyes and waited for her to shut the door, leaving him naked and still looking at the ceiling, vision blurring with tears. The next day – or something that felt like it – she untied his hands and brought in her hired muscle. Sitting on the floor with her arms around her knees, like a child, she watched the whole thing.

Now she pulls him up and he knows what's expected of him.

Clients have beaten John. They've let him hang by his wrists for hours, straining to make his feet reach the ground. He's been denied water, food, made to pay for it with his body. He can't even put a number to how many people have visited him in these cells. But none of them have ever hurt him quite so bad as Rose.

She lays on her back, eyes closed; if he didn't know better, he'd call her blissful. He tries to feel desire for her as he touches himself. Some days he manages to, and he's ashamed of himself for it, like he's giving up another little part of himself to her. Some days he can't, and the best he can do is crowd out the memories of what she's done to him. Either way it makes him feel dirtier afterwards, emptier, being forced to participate in his own rape.

He favors his bruises and eases himself over Rose, who still lays there almost smiling. She knows how much he hates this. That's why she makes him do it.

He closes his eyes and hopes it will be over quickly.

It never is.


	3. Whiplash Girl-Child

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _"I know, you don't believe me. I'd rather you didn't, tell the truth.”_

Laura stays awake most of the night at Benny's, drifting in a state of peaceful drunkenness on the couch while picking the odd paragraph out of _Venus in Furs_ , because if she's going to stay here she might as well get the full experience. Benny is passed out in his bedroom, still dressed, so she half-sings the Velvet Underground under her breath – shiny shiny, shiny boots of leather. She hums the next few lines, the ones she doesn't know, and thinks of the man in the basement with his suit and bare room. It would make so much sense for him to just be another Severin – or what she assumes Severin is, from her lackadaisical reading. Even if it's all whips and boots, everybody in the damn book still talks like they're writing letters, and that's more than she can handle right now.

But with her head spinning, it's harder to deceive herself. He could barely look at them, even before Benny – she doesn't want to say forced, but it's the only word – him to humiliate himself for a little luxury. She thinks of him on his knees, cigarette in hand, as they walked out the door and Benny locked it behind him. She tries not to think about the fact that she would have enjoyed watching him, if not for the doubt. And as she drifts to sleep, she thinks that she probably has it all wrong somehow, and that everything's got to really be all right.

The next day is a weekday, and she's in the decadent position of having nothing to do but wander down the streets, imagining that people are watching her from windows with envy and disapproval. Her purse holds a notebook and a cheap paperback she found a small stack of at a bookstore last week, not Sacher-Masoch but something called _X-Ray Hellions_ whose orange cover bears a young woman in a tied-up black shirt with the front button popped open, boot resting on a pile of skulls and lip curled into a belligerent grin. She decides to ration it and only reads the frontispiece, lined with clumsy praise from authors she's never heard of, and the first chapter, an overwritten lesbian love scene stuffed with references to some unknown but horrifying disaster. The notebook remains empty, because nothing she's thinking about should be committed to paper just yet. So she finds a store – _shop_ – and tries more clothing, drifting from one outfit, one era, one personality to another until she checks her watch and sees it's almost time for Benny to open the club.

“What on earth is that?” he asks, waving a hand at her severe black shirt, a high neck cutting away in patterns that expose her arms but now, she thinks, must look ludicrously ostentatious.

“I thought it fit. You know.”

“I...” he trails off and just lets her in. With its lights on, the place's colors are all wrong; it looks more like a poorly decorated lobby than a den of sin. She starts to ask him about a drink, to sit at the bar and laugh at the wall hangings, anything to take her mind off the question she came here to ask. “Hey, Benny,” she calls before she can give herself time to think.

“Yeah?”

“That man – John. Is he still here, I mean, right now?”

Benny gestures bemusedly. “You still don't believe me?”

She shrugs and tries to sound casual, though if she was fine yesterday, she doesn't know why Benny would think anything is wrong. “I mean, I'm just curious. It seems so crazy. Can I talk to him?”

On the contrary, Benny sounds nervous but also delighted – maybe he's just glad he's finally convinced her of something. “Well... nobody's there any more, tonight. I guess I could take you back.”

She nods and tries to keep up her smile as they walk the route back again, until he unlocks and opens the door. When she makes to go in, he stops her.

“What?”

Benny hesitates a little too long before laughing. “I know you can handle yourself, but come on – no point making things risky.” He leaves her outside for a few minutes and then trades places, nodding as he leaves and telling her to just ring when she wants to come back up. She doesn't ask what she should ring, because the door has shut behind her and she's alone with – what's his name? John Constantine.

He's not the man in the neat suit from yesterday – it's the same suit, but now it looks like he got in a fight in it, the buttons popped off and the fabric crumpled. His hands are cuffed to the table, and she understands what Benny meant about fixing risk.

“Very Sid Vicious,” she says.

She's sitting right there across from him, but he starts like he's just noticed her. “What?”

“The suit.” That wasn't really what she meant to say, and it was almost certainly the wrong start to the conversation, but there's not a lot she _can_ say.

At first, she doesn't think he's going to answer. He's looking down at the table, one hand clenched and the other flat against the table. Then he makes a noise in his throat. “Americans. Only ever know two British punk bands, only know two stage names from one of them.”

“Lucky I mentioned them at all. Just ripping off Richard Hell anyways.”

He sounds about to retort, but it's like something catches in him, and he's suddenly the shell he was yesterday, silent and remote. Laura nods to fill the space, knowing that she hasn't got the guts to go right out and ask him stupid, simple, earnest questions like _Why are you here?_ They just sit at the table across from each other, her high collar starting to itch against her neck.

Laura waits and waits, but she can't do it. “I'm sorry,” she says finally. She stands and starts wondering where this ringer is, blood pounding in her ears. She's not from a world of magicians and basements and, maybe basements, but...

“No.” She stops. He's still not looking at her, but his voice is clear. “What month is it?”

“April,” she says. “Why?”

“And what year?”

Laura tells him. He stares at her, like maybe he thinks she's lying, and she tries to look as honest as possible. Then he tries to raise his hands to rub his eyes, but the cuffs stop them short, and Laura thinks she's never seen anybody so miserable. Before she can turn away to leave him be, he stops her. “And you,” he says. “You're his girlfriend? Mistress? No other reason he'd take you back here.”

She snorts. “Benny? God.” She explains as well as she can, trying to distance herself from what she saw yesterday, the way Benny talked about this man who's clearly either deranged or...

“What are you, then?”

He's the one who laughs now, short and bitter. “Didn't you hear him? I'm a bloody magician.”

“Come on.”

John shrugs. She sees him try to move his hands again. “It'd be more true to say that I used to be one – yes, I know, you don't believe me. I'd rather you didn't, tell the truth.”

When he gestures with one hand, his sleeve falls up and she can see bruises. “Did Benny do that?” she asks with growing apprehension. But he shakes his head.

“Benny told you that there are filthy rich bastards who want to meet me,” he says slowly, like she's a child. “That I'm famous. And he's right. I am. But I suppose he didn't tell you that half of them come because they hate me. And the other half because they've got something to prove.”

“Got what to prove, exactly?”

“That they can spend an hour or two doing whatever they want to a man who's supposed to be able to beat any system, so long as they sign a bloody check.”

He looks at her with his sharp blue eyes, He could be lying or deluded – the sheer weirdness of the situation points to that. But if it's the latter, this is the last place he should be, and if it's the former, it's one of the most extraordinarily elaborate S&M games she's ever seen. If, on the other hand, he isn't, then Benny is far worse than a callous but entertaining bastard. That option is feeling more and more likely by the minute. The whole magician thing, that's another story, but she gets the feeling that the closer word would be hustler, or con man. And, taking his word, one who annoyed the wrong people.

“So why can't you beat this system, then?” She says it haltingly, expecting him to lash out or refuse to answer.

He looks down instead, running one thumb over the tips of all his fingers. “I've tried. And I almost have, sometimes. But there's somebody a lot stronger than me at the end of my rope.”

“I'll call the cops, then. I'll do it right now. Come on, I'm a pretty-ish white girl, who wouldn't come do a raid for me – ”

“No!” He sounds somewhere between furious and panicked. “They'll come raid, yes. And they'll put me in a car and take me to a nice, locked room. And then somebody will show up – another pretty girl or a middle-aged businessman, and they'll have ward papers that prove I'm mad – they wouldn't even be lying. And then it'll be another locked room, one a great deal worse than this, with a lot of men waiting for a chance to teach me my place.”

Laura nods, stunned. “I'm... I'm sorry. I didn't mean to.”

He seems lost to her, though, distracted. His shirt, with its lost buttons, has come open a little, exposing his pale chest, and as she looks at his fingers closer, she sees that at least one's a little crooked, like it was snapped and set wrong. This isn't something she's equipped to deal with at all; it's not even something that should happen outside pulp novels.

“Would you like me to leave?”

There's no answer at first, again. Eventually, he nods. “T'be honest, yes, if you wouldn't mind. But – ” he swallows and draws breath, like he's about to say something that will pain him “ – if he'll let you, come back.”

Benny raises an eyebrow at her when he meets her outside John's cell. She composes herself and pretends to be as skeptical, as casual, as yesterday. “What?” she asks.

“Well, should I start charging you?”

“Char – no!” Is he really selling some beaten, chained man who doesn't even know what year it is? She still can't really believe it. “You said he was a magician, yeah? I want to learn magic.”

Benny laughs and puts the final key in its lock. “Sure,” he says. “As much as you want.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> No seriously though, _Venus in Furs_ is a very particular kind of stilted. Especially if you're comparing it to the Marquis de Sade "I held a giant torture-themed improv session and wrote all the stage notes into a book" style.
> 
> Also I think John Constantine conjured the ghost of Sid Vicious at some point, although my memory's not good enough to remember where.


	4. The Nowhere Room

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _He suspected it wasn't air at all, but water._

The farthest John ever got was Paris. He'd nicked a passport and wallet from the closest approximation of himself within a dozen blocks and even gotten through customs on the other side. Outside, though, a tanned, athletic couple who looked like honeymooners stopped him.

“Sorry, but do you know where currency exchange is?”

“Sorry, mate – ” he started to reply, but suddenly there was a hand on his neck, around his throat. He broke away to run, and that was when he was lost – there were guards everywhere, and when they hauled him back, gasping, the couple had all the nasty details from Ravenscar, all the shock treatments, all the other things that explain why he's mentally unsound, and it's all right, sir, we'll just take him home. In a desperate final attempt, he tried to break free and throw a punch at one of the guards, just to get arrested and buy a little more time. But they had zip ties cutting the skin around his wrists by then, and the couple left them on until he was far away from anyone but them.

The next few – he doesn't even know if they were hours or days, because they felt like months, years. In a room that was dark and so utterly silent that it nearly swallowed the sound of his movements. The best way to describe it was that it felt like _nowhere_ , the floor made of wire and the walls of smooth cardboard, leaving him with nothing to hear but himself – his pulse, his breath, a ringing in his ears that grew more and more unbearable by the minute. He talked to himself just to drown it out, hearing his own weak voice disappear into the dark. He talked to Rose, screamed at her, screamed at all of them, the bastards. When there was no answer, he tried to stand and feel for the door, but as soon as he got off his knees, he was struck by a dizziness, the feeling that he didn't even know which way was up, let alone out; he fell hard and clung to the wire, barely able to move. Sleep, that was all he could do to pass the time, even if his heart was pounding so hard all he could reach was an uneasy half-stupor.

Nonetheless, he was startled when they blindfolded him and pulled him out, into something not so different to his old cell. Looking back, he wishes he'd never bothered with the flight now, just spent the little freedom he had in a park or on the streets – anything to feel the sun and breathe fresh air for a few hours. Then, he hadn't cared, so profound his relief to see and hear anything at all. Even if they stripped him and shackled his ankles to a bolt on the floor, even if the male half of the tanned couple kicked him so hard he could feel his ribs crack, then got on his knees and whispered in John's ear. _Do you know what I'm going to do to you?_

_Yes_ , John had said, as loudly as he could. _Just get it over with_. The man had laughed at that, and when he was on top of John a few minutes later, one hand pinning his arms above his head, he had bitten John's ear hard enough to draw blood and told him that it wasn't going to be quick, that he was going to feel every minute of it. John tried to stay silent as the man pounded into him, breathing hard with panic that had nothing to do with the pain – no, he was afraid of what would happen when the man was finished with him.

When they pushed him back inside and closed the door, he stayed calm. Unlike last time, though, sleep eluded him. The darkness was a palpable entity, the drumbeat of his own pulse unbearable. But soon he became aware of it fading, only to be replaced by a dull, murmuring sound. The air felt thick, until he suspected it wasn't air at all, but water. That would be the murmuring – the sound of the ocean, waiting to swallow him. But no, it wasn't only that, it was lighter, the breathing of some great black thing in the corner. The thing was waiting for him to move, he could see its shape, somehow slightly lit from behind. He closed his eyes, but it was still there, and its breaths grew shorter and louder, as if it knew he was afraid, was getting ready to spring at him.

John didn't dare move, didn't dare close his eyes. He lay on the ground frozen in fear, willing his lungs and heart to be quiet, so that thing wouldn't hear them. When the door opened and the light streamed in, he almost screamed – didn't they know the thing was waiting for him? Didn't they know it would get him if he moved? But they just dragged him back to the big cell with its harsh lighting, where the female honeymooner straddled him, white-clad and glowing, and told him to give her his hand. He tried to protest, but he didn't have the words, and when she lifted his hand herself and cupped it between her own, he was too tired to refuse.

Sudden, blinding agony. He should have felt it in his finger, but somehow that was the eye of the storm, everything else radiating in waves through his body. He tried to throw her off, but she was stronger than he was, and she punished him with another snapped finger, looking down at him with something like mild curiosity. _Are you ready to pay attention?_ She asked. He nodded, and she guided his broken fingers down her stomach and under her white tennis dress.

When they uncuffed his ankles and started the walk back, something snapped. He was almost delirious with pain, but somehow he managed to break free and scream at them _No, no you can't, anything else._ They forced him inside again, ignoring his cries, but he clung to the door, begging them to come back. He didn't know the honeymooner's names, but he promised them anything they wanted, promised every sexual favor he'd ever been forced to grant, promised to never leave again. The thing came back, and he kept begging, quieter, like a prayer. He still doesn't know how much of it they heard. But eventually the door opened and someone turned on the light above, blinding him.

He made to turn, but a hand pressed down on his neck, pushing one cheekbone into the sharp wire below him. _Have you learned your lesson?_ John realized that he was crying then, saying yes, a million permutations of yes. Then they reminded him of what he'd promised. They took it right there, where he could hear every one of his gasps and their groans, where the floor cut into his knees and his heart beat unbearably loud in his ears. He didn't care. He was almost grateful.

He doesn't remember it, but they must have brought him back here. He kept the lights on for days afterwards, thankful they allowed him that much freedom. And he contemplated, for the millionth time, the freedom they had never tried to take away: the freedom to die, to tie up a noose and loop it over a door. But he still hasn't gotten that low, no matter what Rose, what any of them, do to him. He's not going to let the bastards win.

The girl doesn't know about any of this, of course. What does she think he is? Some paranoid schizophrenic, being taken advantage of in a dungeon? And he still suspects she must be some cruel trick, especially with the date she gave him – it makes him want to weep, thinking that's how much time he's lost. But all that aside, she's the only person who's offered anything except cruelty for a very long time. He's willing to put aside his suspicions just to have a bit of conversation with someone who might not hurt him afterwards.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [Turns out this](https://archiveofourown.org/works/907572) is the only piece in AO3 that mentions [anechoic chambers](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anechoic_chamber). And it's more of a metaphorical thing.
> 
> There should be more! They're crazy.


	5. Peculiar Tastes

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _“I can help you.”_
> 
> _“Like hell you can.”_

Laura's curiosity isn't satisfied after a second meeting, a third. She lets him set the topics of conversation with hesitant questions that are mostly about sports teams, politicians – none of which she can really answer, because the only stuff she ever learned about either subject was from American cultural osmosis and that doesn't exactly cover his football teams and Parliament. He accepts her terrible, bumbling explanations nonetheless, and she gleans information about him, piece by piece.

His name is John Constantine, though she already knew that, obviously. He hasn't shown any signs of magical powers, but when he mentions his old life it seems infused with magic – trips to remote temples, chaining demons on rooftops while a city slumbers underneath. She'd think he were making it up if it didn't seem to make him so sad, and anyways, these stories are rare. Even rarer are any details about why he's here. She gathers that he made somebody (or a lot of people, he implies) ridiculously, vengeance-seeking angry, and that once they'd gotten him here, inertia had done the rest: everyone who had been afraid of him before wanted a chance to break him now.

All this is granted assuming he's telling the truth, but Benny wasn't lying about clients, who she sometimes discreetly watches arrive while helping set up the bar or clear tables. Old money, new money, but always _money_ , with few exceptions.

She's not just too tactful to ask questions about that, she's afraid of learning answers. Sometimes, though, she must be absolutely transparent.

“I knew a few of them,” John says out of the blue as a previous topic of conversation dies.

“Oh.” Laura waits, but he doesn't elaborate. She finally tries again.

“Were they enemies, or...”

He shrugs. “Some of them.”

“Well what about -” she hesitates again. “Wouldn't any of them help you?”

She knows it's stupid as soon as she says it – what did he say before? If there's someone stronger than him involved, from what he's told her, who knows how many people would be able to help. But he doesn't tell her that.

“I used to think they might,” he says. “Wasn't right, of course.”

“Then...”

“I was desperate. I wouldn't do it again.”

*

Mina was born into money. John had met her only once before the brand, and he had found her unremarkable, but he hadn't counted on the strange tenacity that wealth can breed. Not getting something she wanted was like having a nasty hangnail, he thought: she couldn't stop picking at it, and she had every opportunity to do so. He'd turned her down, once. But now she had paid.

She dropped her expensive jacket on the floor and looked him over, a feeling he'd become accustomed to. He was just as accustomed to being told to kneel and undress by the club owner, the old one, and to lie back so they could cuff him to the floor. It didn't make it better. Back then every indignity just flayed his raw nerves a little more, as he fought against the resignation he would later try just as hard to maintain. He could still hope, he promised himself. He could keep himself from giving up.

This hope highlighted the fact that her eyes held his when they reached his face. They were alone now, and she dropped beside him, something like pity in her voice as she spoke. “My god, John,” she said. It was the first time in days anyone had acknowledged he had a name at all. It almost made it bearable when she used him. Almost.

Afterwards, she lay beside him, stroking his hair like they were lovers. It was the moment the idea came to him. He asked her to come back. He flattered her and dropped hints, subtle, as if it would be her idea when it came. Until finally it did, a plan coming off for the first time in how long:

“I can help you.”

“Like hell you can.” Even then, he knew he should dismiss her, but his voice betrayed him and turned hesitant. Hope.

What she laid out made sense at the time. A commission from someone rich, well-placed, gullible, and fascinated by the occult. There were enough of those sorts, and Mina had put in a good word. All he had to do was get his attention. And Mina could facilitate that by doing the only thing she seemed to have an aptitude for.

She threw a party.

John had been in the salon before, but Mina's tiny and pricey affair was classier than most, the seediness of the establishment providing the real thrill for guests. She eschewed boots and leather for electric blue satin slit high up her leg, her only concession to form a severe auburn updo and dark opera gloves.

“There's only so much slumming the poor man can take,” she confided delicately, whispering in his ear. John wondered how much she'd spent to get the right amount of slumming. He wondered how much she'd spent on him. “But he couldn't keep away. _Le vice Anglais_ , you know? He has peculiar tastes.”

He wasn't actually English, whatever his vice. He spoke bland, thick American patois and dressed like a Beat poet forced into a country club blazer. He was older than John, but younger than he had expected. Not yet even middle-aged. Mina put a hand on both their shoulders as she introduced them.

The man smiled. “I shouldn't have doubted Mina. You're a specimen.”

John returned his grin. It felt surprisingly natural on his face, as if being allowed somewhere outside his cell, free from restraints, was all he needed. With a mark who just needed to be blinded by a little charm.

They exchanged a few words, but it quickly became clear that Mina had made the proposition for him. Fingers on the man's jacket buttons, a few whispered words, did the rest.

“I love accents,” his would-be patron said as they walked down to his cells. “You make me happy, and you won't have to worry about a thing. I won't ask for anything more, except some help hunting down manuscripts, maybe. Freelance. We're not the type to settle down, are we?”

John slid the man's jacket off his shoulders and gestured to the stone walls. “I don't look at home to you?” The man laughed and shut the door behind them.

“Good,” he said. “How entirely perfect.”

_Peculiar tastes_ , John remembered. He moved to slide a hand under the man's shirt. “So, what do you – ” 

The man slapped him.

He took it in stride and tried to continue, but the man had grabbed hold of his suit jacket and slammed him against the wall, throwing a fist into his stomach. John doubled over but the man held him up and hit him again, one hand around his throat.

“That's cute,” he said, breathing the words into John's ear. “But I don't give a fuck about your sad attempts at seduction. Here is what will happen, if you want things to go well. You will do everything – _everything_ – I say. You'll do it like I turn you on more than any human being alive, unless I say otherwise. I told Mina, and I'll tell you: I can help you, no strings attached. But for tonight, I own you. Do you agree?”

“Yes.” John steadied himself. He was owned already. This was nothing new.

“Don't look me in the eye. Get down and suck me off. _Nicely_.”

Another slap. Off-balance, John fell to his knees gracelessly. He was learning, painfully, what people wanted from him and how to give it. It wasn't pleasure. It was power. They wanted to feel how he tensed when they put a hand on his shoulder. They wanted to know that he was trying not to gag when they slid into his mouth. They wanted to know that he was aware of everything they did to him and unable to stop it. When he reached for his patron's trousers, though, the man grabbed a fistful of his hair and pulled his head back.

“ _Like you want to_ ,” the man reminded him. “You were so enthusiastic a few minutes ago.” Slowly, John nodded.

It was still power at stake, but crueler and more subtle, John thought. Buying someone who was helpless and making them pretend to enjoy your abuse. Except that he hadn't been bought, not this time. He had chosen this.

He tried again, forcing a moan as he took the man's cock in his hand, his mouth. He had forgotten what enthusiasm felt like, but he tried to pretend. He was failing badly, and that was part of the act too, having to keep up this display that he knew would have fooled no one who wasn't getting off on his humiliation.

Without being told, he understood that he shouldn't try to hurry it. The man's smooth, cold hand rested on the side of his face and a finger swept over his eyelid, touched the cartilage of his ear, gently stopped him from moving. John caught his breath.

“Look at you,” the man said softly. “I'd heard your name before Mina mentioned it, you know. 'The great John Constantine.' After I saw you, though – there's just something about a pretty, powerful man that makes you wonder what he'd look like on his knees.” He thrust deeper into John's mouth, made him choke. “Well, now I know.”

He let John keep going for a few more minutes. Then without warning, he pushed him away and kicked him, standing perfectly still as he collapsed.

“Do you really want me?”

John coughed. He tasted blood. “What?”

All he could see were the man's shoes, black patent leather. The toe of one came up to part his lips, touching his teeth.

“I want you. But you _need_ me. If you really want help, you're going to have to beg me to take you into that bedroom.”

Of course he was.

The shoe rested on top of his hand now, keeping him on the floor. He didn't look up.

“Please,” he said. The shoe pressed harder.

“Please what?” the man asked. “You can look at me now, by the way. You ought to.”

John raised his head and tried to even his voice. “Please, I... I want you.”

The man laughed. John's knuckles ached, crushed against the floor. “Is that all? I could leave right now, you know. I hear you've got a girlfriend who comes around. I could have a chat with her.”

“No! No, don't go.” He grabbed at the hem of the man's trousers with his free hand. “Nobody's gotten anything from me without paying except you. You're different, I knew the second I saw you. I knew what I wanted you to do to me.” He bent his head and pulled the shoelace knot loose with his teeth, moved his lips to the man's ankle. The weight lifted from his hand, and John worked his way up until his palms rested on the man's hips. This time the man held his head and pushed hard down his throat, while he struggled to breathe. He remembered the brief moment when he had felt like he had some tiny bit of control over the situation.

He waited for the man to come, but he pulled out again, hooking a finger under John's tie. This time, John understood.

“No,” he said. “No, don't stop. God – ” He wondered how much would be enough.

The man zipped his trousers and walked towards the bedroom. John started to stand and follow, but the man shook his head.

“On your hands and knees,” he said. “Crawl.”

John nodded and looked at the floor. He tried to think of being free, being woken up by the sun and smoking Silk Cuts by the pack and everything else that he had taken for granted. It had all gone fuzzy around the edges, though, and what finally motivated him was remembering being cuffed hand and foot on the floor while Mina looked at him like a piece of furniture. One more night, and it could all be over.

He felt his knees scrape the floor, and his hands were hot against the stone, his eyes raised just enough to see into the bedroom. Inside, he knelt at the man's feet.

“You know what I want,” he said hoarsely.

“You'll get it. Take your jacket off.”

He stripped piece by piece, until the man yanked him up by his tie and threw him all but naked on the bed. John felt a piece of his jacket's lining stuffed into his mouth before he was pushed onto his stomach, his tie removed and wrapped around his wrists. The man lashed him to the bed frame, leaving him struggling to breathe with his face pressed to the pillow. He felt skin on his back and a tongue on his earlobe.

“You really would have done anything I asked, wouldn't you?”

John stayed silent, fear slowly spreading through his veins.

“Maybe I actually _should_ get you out. You'd be good entertainment. But I thought you'd be smarter than to fall for something like this.”

He wasn't even surprised. Some part of him had expected it, but he'd pushed the thought aside, hoping he could muster a little of the persuasion he'd once had. He wasn't stupid. He was only desperate.

John tried to spit the gag out and scream at the man, to break free and throw him off the bed, to break his nose and make him crawl out the way he'd crawled. The tie only tightened around his wrists, and the man's weight pinned him down. He pulled frantically and tried to turn over. The man laughed.

“I'd heard stories about you,” he said. “I have my own now, I guess. John Constantine begged me to tie him up and fuck him. How many people do you think can tell that one?” He laughed. “Probably more than I know.”

John tried to say something, but it got lost in the gag, and soon all he wanted was to black out, go catatonic while his body ached and the man kept whispering into his ear.

“I should make you thank me. Men like you like it rough, no matter what you say. You want somebody to come and show you where you belong.”

John had stopped fighting him. His tongue was dry behind the cloth, his wrists raw, his lungs burning from trying to draw air from cotton. His heart was pounding almost too loud for him to hear the man's moan of satisfaction as he pulled out and came across John's back.

There was a hand in his hair, fingers sliding down his neck: “Good boy.” He turned his head, feeling hot, wet spots beneath his eyes on the pillow. The gag stayed in place, and he couldn't even scream as the man patted his shoulder and walked away, leaving him tied to the bed.

Later, in a new set of clothes, wrists still tender with blisters, he realized that he could no longer pretend this was something temporary. That was when he tried to run for the first time.


	6. The Leap

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _She stays next to him at the table, resolutely stopping herself from trying to talk about the kiss. At least, she says to herself later, he never really answered her question._

“So, how exactly does one stop being a... magician?” Laura finally asks one day. John's been unusually forthcoming, seems almost happy, his suit newly pressed. When she asks, he's quiet but not obviously offended.

“Come on, then. I'll show you.” He gestures to his side of the table. Since their first meeting, Benny has relaxed, and now John's only cuffed by one ankle, but if she were inclined to worry about his intentions she still wouldn't be afraid of him. Sure he's tall, but he's thin and seems terribly tired. So she walks over and sits beside him. His eyes are alive today, and his fingers are deft as he begins to unbutton his jacket.

Laura watches him slide the coat off and move on to his tie, his shirt, not all that certain what's going on but not ready to complain, either. Finally he slides off one sleeve of the shirt, the other, and she gets a look at his bare skin. She almost looks away at first – not out of modesty, but because the marks on his back make it harder to imagine going back up to Benny, or the couch in his apartment. They've healed almost too smoothly to believe, these narrow and haphazard stripes crossing the span of his body. That's not what he wants her to see, though. He runs his fingers over his shoulder, and she sees the brand.

Her automatic social instinct is to coo appreciatively over things that look like tattoos – _Oh, it's beautiful_ – but in this case, she expects that's not the appropriate response. It is beautiful, though, vaguely circular but far too intricate to be described as any shape in particular.

“Oh,” she says instead. Maybe it's like the Fleur-de-lis, a sign that he's supposed to be executed by some magical fraternity. “This means you're not supposed to do magic or –”

“– means I can't. Binding mark – like insulation round a copper wire. Very thick insulation. The sort you can't take off without some very expert help.”

“I'm...” she has to decide now, if she believes in magic. She believes _he_ believes, but that's not enough. She'd only be humoring him. “God,” she says. She takes the leap, if only provisionally, barring future evidence. “That's horrible.” Her fingers hover near it, then touch, tracing the edges. His skin is soft and pale around them, and she thinks about how much it must have hurt, though all she can really conjure is a combination of elements from superficial burns in her past and the pretty, dramatic reenactments of movie stars or bad prose artists.

Without thinking, Laura hugs him, head resting on his shoulder. He seems stiff at first but then leans into her embrace, wrapping his arms around her. “I'm so sorry,” she says.

“Not as though I haven't had time to adjust,” he says, but it comes off hollow, not sardonic.

Laura doesn't know why _she's_ almost crying, but it might have something to do with the strangeness of his warm skin under her hands, or of his smell, his breath on her hair. He's only gotten more attractive since they started meeting, all those hints of something exotic beyond this cell or the club or London, given by a mysterious man with powerful enemies. She doesn't even care how much of it is true. One of her hands feels for his hair, and the other she puts on his cheek, turning his face to hers. She registers surprise before she kisses him.

He's the same with her kiss – hesitant and then compliant, following her lead. She moves her lips to his neck and reaches for his waist, pulling herself to him. She's about to reach lower when she realizes that he's barely moved, his arms still around her shoulders. It's only when she pulls back and looks at him that it hits her: he's acting as if she were Benny, making him pay for her conversation.

Laura pulls away. John looks past her. “It's nothing – nothing – it's fine,” he says, “Just give me...”

She shakes her head quickly. The reality of what she tried to do is settling around her now and all she can think about is the chain on his leg and that for a moment she considered pressing forward despite his reluctance, leading him to the floor and slipping off the rest of his clothes. Looking into those blue eyes, no matter how distant their gaze.

And it's not as if she shouldn't have known better, because though he never says it she knows what they do to him. He'll ask sometimes – _is anybody coming today?_ She usually gets the word from Benny, who doesn't pay much attention. When she says yes, he nods and goes quiet. It makes Laura feel furious and powerless, especially when Benny points out one of the customers. _What if you what if we bought them out?_ Benny always shrugs. _More than you can afford, or me._

She slides away from him on the bench. “I promise,” she says. “I promise I won't do that again. I shouldn't have in the first place.”

“Christ,” he says. “You don't have to talk to me like I'm some wounded bird. I don't need your heroic self-control.”

“Well fine, then, it's not heroic,” she snaps, stung, even if part of her knows he was right to say it. “I just don't want to sleep with somebody who doesn't want me. And you don't, do you?”

“I...” his tone turns wry. “Apologies. We're both going to say things we regret now. I forgive you in advance.”

Laura almost smiles, not because it's really funny but because she's willing to take anything that will make her feel better and, if she can, forget that any of this ever happened. “So I can say anything?”

“Sure.” He almost manages to disguise the long wait before his answer as a dramatic pause.

“I might have made up some of those football scores.”

She stays next to him at the table, resolutely stopping herself from trying to talk about the kiss. At least, she says to herself later, he never really answered her question.


	7. The Jakarta Deal

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _"We were very, very close. And you, you bastard, killed him."_

He could have laughed when she jumped away from him, at her sudden earnestness. Unless she's the sort for very well-hidden darkness, the worst she has in her is the best he can hope for from most of his visitors. As he keeps thinking after she leaves, though, he realizes that he didn't expect her to be paying that much attention. He's so used to being told what to do that the idea of someone asking what he wants feels alien. And in this case, he doesn't _know_ if he should want her. He likes her, but he has enough dignity to know that he'd like almost anybody who treated him like a person down here. She's pretty – not exactly Page Three, but an attractive combination of soft curves and tough affect. He hasn't slept with anyone willingly since the brand. But he worries that this is a steep cliff towards Stockholm syndrome, falling for the first nominally decent human being he sees. And he worries that if she'd gone further, he would have only seen Rose, forcing him into a mockery of affection.

It doesn't matter. He shouldn't let himself think of her at all, because when she leaves – and she will leave – he'll have let his guard down for nothing.

He's drifted to sleep when Benny wakes him and tells him to dress. The man in the main room is one he's never seen before, tall and muscular in a way that makes his seersucker suit ridiculous – never mind the fact that, if Laura is right, it's spring in London. Which isn't to say this man, the look on his face, doesn't make him nervous. Benny leaves, and John watches the door close behind him.

“Sit down,” the man says, though he makes no move to do the same. John waits but finally sits at the table.

“Do you know who I am?”

“Should I?”

The man laughs hard. “No, I suppose I wouldn't expect you to. What about Jakarta?”

John shouldn't bother thinking about this. Everyone has some reason to hate him; he's been escaping karma for a long time now, and now that it's caught up to him he feels no need to pay it more mind. Still, he thinks back and yes, Jakarta's in there: dusty, narrow streets packed full with motorbikes, great white houses shut in by metal gates. Some sort of antiques deal that went wrong, he recalls.

“Not you, though,” he says. “Not unless you were in fancy dress as a pair of mephistan candlesticks.”

The man has walked behind him and put a hand on his neck, but John hears him nonetheless. “And the dealer?”

“The...” Jesus, that's bad. He does, now. The slack, baggy face at the end, hands withered, body shaking as it consumed itself. You don't make deals with the jilted gods.

“You don't look --”

The man grabs his neck and leans closer. “He's dead, you idiot. I'm someone else. But we were very, very close. And you, you bastard, killed him.”

“I didn't --” But he did, or at least he let him die. The thing – some desperate, nameless deity – had been stronger than he expected. He'd put the chances at a little over half that he could conjure it out and bind it. Those were terrible odds for something that could turn a man into empty skin without so much as a blister. And everything had gone so fast.

The man seems to sense that he remembers, now. “You won't forget. Not again.” John wishes he could have bought himself a little more time, but there's only so long he can delay the inevitable. It's not very long. He's dragged off the bench, against the wall, and his head spins as a fist comes down on his face. He tries to stay standing, but the man hits his chest, his stomach, until John instinctively strikes back. It's a mistake. The next punch hits him so hard he stumbles, and he's trying to get off his hands and knees but the man kicks him in the ribs. He goes limp for a second, and the man turns him onto his back, resting a foot on his throat just enough to make breathing difficult.

“Good. I want you to fight me,” he says. “You're going to fight as hard as you can, as hard as they tell me Yusef did. And you are going to lose.”

John feels the pressure lift from his neck and decides to take the man at his word. He pulls the man's leg out from under him and hears him fall with a grunt. While he's righting himself, John scrambles to his feet, because there must be something blunt and heavy, maybe in the bedroom.

He never gets that far. He's knocked to the floor again, pinned this time on his stomach, the man straddling him and pulling his arm behind his back. “Don't feel bad,” he says. “It was a nice try.” Then he twists John's arm up as far as it will go. Farther. John screams, but he doesn't stop, and something tears, pops. The man's other hand is around his throat, and he's still pushing, until John feels a wave of nausea and everything goes dim.

He comes to what must be moments later, arm free but on fire. He almost throws up when the man grabs his hair and yanks him to his knees. The man has one hand on his flies now, undoing the buttons. John thinks of the instructions – fight as hard as you can. That isn't all that hard, he realizes. His vision is fading in and out as the man pulls out his cock and pushes it between John's lips. He gags and knows he should feel humiliated for giving up so easily, but it just hurts too much. He'll do anything for this to be over.

He hopes it _will_ be over when he brings the man off, swallows and drops to his hands and knees. But he isn't surprised when the man kicks him viciously and laughs when he gasps for air, says he thought a whore would be better at that. John tries to stand up and throw another punch, do something. He's too dizzy. Then, for what feels like hours, nothing happens. He lays on the ground, eyes closed, feeling the sharp agony of his arm and the cool flagstone beneath his hands and face. It's almost enough to bring him back to his senses, the quiet so vast that he wonders if the man is gone.

“Get up.”

It takes several tries for him to do it one-handed, and he nearly falls when he gets off his knees. The man does nothing, only watches. Finally he stands, shaking, looking into the man's eyes.

“Off.” The man gestures at his clothes. John won't give him the satisfaction of protesting that he can barely move – he won't beg, even if he can't resist. Even if he passes out. He tries to keep his damaged arm still as his good one fumbles for the buttons on his jacket and shirt, tries to avoid looking at anything while he struggles to pull them off. When he kneels to remove his shoes he falls and can't make himself move again, no matter how hard he tries.

The room is dark; everything is muffled. He feels hands on him, roughly stripping him, a voice that he can't parse. More pain, though his arm has at least reached a state of bearable numbness. The rest of his body is on the way. He knows the man is going to fuck him, now. He knows how much it's going to hurt. But he understands this only dimly, as he mumbles responses to the man's instructions and turns away, looks at the wall while the man says he paid too much and pins John's arms above his head, forcing them straight until he screams. There, the man says. You owe me a lot more of that.

When he wakes up, he's alone and the lights are off. Or maybe they're not off, and he's been blinded. Whenever he loses time, he's afraid that they've done something to him – sometimes they have, though never something like that. One eye hurts, but it's barely even noticeable stacked against every other injury he's taken. His arm barely even feels like it's attached any more. And he thinks, for the first time in a very long while: _I can't keep going._

He looks ahead, and there's nothing except more torture. There will never be an end to people who want to watch him crawl. Rose will never think he's had enough. No matter what they try, there will never be anything worse than having to kiss her and make love to her and pretend it isn't eating him alive.

He wonders if they'll bother to get a doctor to look at his arm, or if they'll just try to snap it back in place and cuff it down. If nothing they've done to him so far has killed him, he might just be indestructible. More's the pity.


	8. A Visit From No Goon Squad

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _"I used to think that, behind all the talk, there was a human being under there."_

Benny makes her wait till the big man in the Tom Wolfe suit has been gone half an hour before he takes her back. She wouldn't have tried to see John at all after a visitor, normally, but something feels wrong – his demeanor, the way one lapel is torn.

“Jesus Christ.” She doubts John hears her, curled on his side and apparently unconscious, one arm drawn around his head. Laura won't hang back like Benny, but she knows she hasn't got the first idea what to do. She starts by reaching a hand to his naked shoulder.

It's wrong. She messed it up because if she'd have got it right he wouldn't have gasped and looked at her like she was a nightmare and then tried to back away but moved one arm, the one resting on the floor, and cried out in pain. “I'm sorry I'm sorry I'm sorry,” she says.

He starts to shake his head but winces and falls back. She can barely hear him: “I can't. No, no more.”

“Benny! Get a... a doctor.”

“Think about it, Laura,” he says. “Who're we going to get? Can't bring him out. Besides, look at him. He'll be fine.”

Laura turns. “Benny,” she says. “I used to think that, behind all the talk, there was a human being under there. I can't think that, not any more. And if you do not get a doctor for this man, who you have _kept_ , in a _torture_ chamber, I will tell the police everything you've done. If you try to sic some kind of... goon on me, I will fucking kill them. And then, when that is all over, I will go outside and I will tell every human being and newspaper that I know and that you know. I will tell them _everything_.”

Her heart is thrumming against her chest, but Benny doesn't retort. He nods and disappears. Laura lets out a deep breath and realizes that everything she said was a useless bluff, given by someone who's never thrown a punch and will wreck everything if she gets anyone else involved. It only worked because for a moment or two, she believed it. She wonders if John believed it too.

She goes back to him. His arm is still flat against the flagstone like it's not even a part of him, and his breathing is shallow and fast. There are tears – of pain, of fear – on his cheeks. Laura looks away; watching him cry seems like even more of an invasion than looking at his bruised body, naked on the floor. Instead she looks in the bedroom for a sheet and kneels, draping it around him. As she comes closer to do so, she can't avoid noticing the bruises on his neck, like a collar, or the bite marks on his shoulder above the brand.

“Hey,” she says. “Hey, Benny's going to – ”

“Get a doctor,” he says. “And he'll fix me up, so they can do it to me all over again.” His laugh is almost a sob. “If I thought you'd do it, I'd ask you to kill me.”

“I could,” she says quietly, voice shaking.

There is a very, very long pause, in which she imagines trying to actually bring in a knife, or stab even something as innocent as a pillow with the knowledge that it was _practice_. Finally he shakes his head. “Rose – that's the woman who put me here – but Rose, she says I hurt people without knowing it.”

“Why would you listen to – ”

“Because she's right. I never want to, but if you knew how many lives I've mucked up, how many friends I've buried... I'm not going to ask you to learn to kill on my account. Bloody hell, you barely know me.”

Laura wants to say no, that's not true, but her relief is too great. “All right. But what if I...”

“What if you what?”

“I mean... what if I helped you get out?”

There are tears in his eyes again, and this time she doesn't look away. “You don't know what they'd do to me,” he says. “You don't know how many times I've tried.”

He manages to prop himself up enough to sit, making noises of pain when his arm – broken? dislocated? – moves. She shouldn't think of the kiss, not with him in this shape. She can't help herself from doing so.

“What can they do?” she asks. “What can they do that's worse than this?”

She can see him start to form a sentence and then hold it, turn it over in his mind. Then he starts to laugh again, or cry; they sound like the same thing. “You're right,” he says. “Ha. You're right.”

The man Benny brings isn't really a doctor, Laura thinks, and he doesn't bother faking a bedside manner. He prods at John, watches him flinch and scream, threatens to gag him if he doesn't shut up. But he has a splint, and he somehow pushes John's arm back in shape. She waits until he's wrapped up the bandages and left, Benny long gone as well with a mix of guilt and wounded sanctimony on his face. She waits until it's just her and John, alone.

And then, they confer.


	9. The Hollow Man

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _"If you ever see her, you won't even need me to point her out. I'd rather have chewed my own arm off than said something to anybody."_

The next few days, Benny alternates between ignoring her and being unsettlingly sympathetic when she visits John, pretending nothing has happened. He doesn't seem to know the extent of her disgust, and she hides it, going back to the paperback with the skull girl – or at least one of the copies, now that she's returned to the bookstore and bought the rest of the stack - whenever she's at his apartment. It's about some kind of Ed Wood girl gang, it turns out, except that they live in a dismal future period the book quaintly describes as “Anno Atomica.” Motorcycles, machine guns, and handcuffs, it turns out, were all treated well by the bomb.

When she wakes up every morning, earlier than Benny, she goes out with a list and a grid of London, hour after hour. She finishes one copy on the subway and starts another, appreciating the little nuances more this time – probably not intentional ones, just the sort of quirks that give any book more depth than it deserves when you read it closely. The tension between the lovers and a new recruit, hinting at a changing of the guard, a strange captive man who appears suddenly and seems on the brink of tearing the group apart with jealousy: innocent bystander or some sort of trojan horse sent by unknown forces? She goes back to the first copy, and back to the beginning again.

Finally, as the girls roar down a broken road somewhere in Liverpool for the fourth time, she knocks on the door of the club.

She says hello to Benny with barely concealed hostility and heads to the bar, but he stops her.

“Look, Laura,” he says. “Fuck, Laura, All that stuff. It isn't me. All that before, with him.”

“It looked like you.”

He shakes his head. “You weren't there when I bought the place – when I found out. They take me down and _oh look_ , there he is – like it's only natural. Of course I thought of calling the police. Even just setting him loose. That was before I saw her.”

“Saw who?” asks Laura, though she already knows.

“Don't really know her name. But if you ever see her, you won't even need me to point her out. I'd rather have chewed my own arm off than said something to anybody. You're the first person I thought I could tell, and I had to pretend everything was okay.”

She thinks of the way he showed John off like an animal. No, no matter what he had to do, he chose to do worse. But there'll be time to tell him that later.

“Then let me see him,” she says.

John's arm is still set, his face and neck still bruised. It's better than last time, though, and when he sees her, he can manage a nod and an ironic sweep of his uninjured hand – _welcome_. Laura gestures around the room and holds her purse in front of her, trying to convey what she's carrying without making it too obvious.

“It's fine,” he says. “No matter what they did, I know how to check for bugs. How did it go?”

She pulls packets from her purse and sets them on the table: chalk, gunpowder, some herbs whose names she forgot as soon as she read them off a note. “Is this going to work on you if... you know...”

“It is if you do it.”

“But I'm not...”

“Think of it as a recipe. I'll make sure it goes right.”

It's not so much a recipe as an art project, which she's even worse at than cooking, but she manages an approximation that John calls _good enough_. Then, at his direction, she reaches into her shirt sleeve and frees a paring knife.

Though it's terrible to say so, she isn't worried about hurting him. He draws breath when she makes the first cut and massages out enough blood for the herbs, but she knows this must be nothing compared to some of the things he's endured, even after the third cut, the fourth. Finally she's done and they all match up, on his skin and hidden around the cell. The words themselves, which she repeats after him, make her think that if it's a spell – which she's still not entirely convinced it is – magic works on the laws of poetry and symbolic cohesion. Six cuts, six bunches, symmetry, synechdoche. One part of the man giving the illusion of the whole, fixed permanently in the cell while his body traveled elsewhere. She could probably analyze spells in high school essay format, with results as dry and off the mark as her exegeses on _The Hollow Men_.

“What about the books?”

“Keep reading. And keep it even.”

“So what happens now?”

“You muster forces.” She's sad to hear him talk about friends, because it makes her think of them leaving him here. But hardly any of them are in London anyways, the way he tells her. She understands some of them are on some mystical plane that is sort of London but sort of not, and calling them up is a difficult concept to grasp. He promises her it won't be that hard.

“Why didn't they come for you?” she asks.

“They didn't know,” he says. “I was too damned proud at first, and then too carefully locked away. Besides – I told you, love, I'm a bastard.”

He's adding a final, underlined line to the page of instructions. Sympathetic resonance, which she doesn't really understand except that it's the thing that lets opera singers crack glasses. With him done, she folds the paper and slides it into her brassiere, the way spies do in thrillers. She thinks she's earned spy-movie rights. He watches her with apparent amusement.

“What?” she asks.

“Everything you do is from some awful James Bond knockoff,” he says.

“Well, where else am I supposed to look?” she asks. “It's not like there's anything else that's this surreal.”

They're sitting next to each other on the bench, him holding the pen from her purse. He drops it, and the next thing Laura feels is his lips on hers.

He's warm and she wraps her arms around him, her tongue meeting his before she even knows what she's doing. Her skin is on fire and it has to touch his; she has to get her fingers around the buttons on his shirt even though she remembers doing this before and remembers how he drew in from her grip. He isn't now, though, he's pulling her to him like a buoy.

Laura eases the shirt off his injured arm and he flinches, but only for a second, because his other hand is moving up her rib cage, under her shirt. She pulls it off and his eyes meet hers for a second. “Is this what you...”

“ _Obviously_ , you bloody idiot,” he says, fingers sliding across her breast as she unhooks her bra. “Obviously it's what I want.”

He's still chained by one ankle, its skin raw, but she lays him out on the floor and parts her naked legs around him, his good hand between her thighs. His eyes are closed, and for a second Laura's frightened that this is just a way of cementing her affection before the plan really starts. And then there's the other fear – that Benny will catch them or some buyer will come in and see her on top of him. But she doesn't care, she realizes. As long as he wants her, as long as he's inside her and her lips are on his neck, she wants to pretend that nothing else exists.

They're fast and frantic, but when she comes, gasping, it feels like she's spent hours, days like this. He finishes a moment later and they lay there, her resting her head on his chest and hearing his heartbeat slow.

He runs fingers through her hair. Part of her imagines finding him afterward – after he escapes – and seeing what this is like when they're not on the cold floor of his cell, with his leg shackled and one arm slack at his side. Maybe she's a terrible person, and this is what she's attracted to about him – his helplessness, his need for her. But that doesn't seem right. He's hurt, but he's not broken, and when they talk he tells her about a world that she couldn't have imagined before, even if it might not exist. She doesn't even know how long he's been imprisoned, how many times he's been injured like this, but he's still able to make her life seem flat and sad by comparison.

Laura makes sure to pick the paper up again as she dresses, this time just putting it in her pocket. “Remember,” John says. “Exactly the same.”


	10. Chicane Destinations

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _"Nobody really remembers old places, once they're gone."_

The next night is a strange blur, because she stays out at the club until midnight to work up her courage and then drinks coffee to counteract the gin, and then ends up dizzy but shaking and alert in the cold night air. She keeps a close hand on her purse but feels silly for doing it – this is yuppie London, she can tell just by looking at the signage. She catches what her tourist guide tells her is the last tube, the one she _has_ to catch, in a particular car: the midnight meat train, she joked when he told her. She'd waited for him to laugh or look confused, but he just raised an eyebrow. “Suppose that's about right. Not that that wanker Barker wrote anything worth reading about it.”

So now it's nearly empty and she's puffing herself up trying to look tough in a shapeless jacket and pegged jeans. She doesn't know what's going to happen, but somehow she can tell when it happens – a second train is catching up to hers, lining up like a traced copy of a picture over the original. Then it's right on top of them, the same path, different trains. They slow for a switch, and she can feel resistance as they begin to pull apart. She steps decisively to one side and closes her eyes with her palm on the door, sure nothing will happen – what will she do then? Go back and tell John that he's crazy? Call the police, like she should have done a week ago? Then what? Wait for her flight at Benny's place, pretending she's never met him?

She still has her eyes closed, listening closely for any difference in sound or smell. She notices nothing, except that the train is slowing for a stop. It is, when she opens her eyes, not the stop she expected.

Laura once read about an impossibly ornate abandoned subway station somewhere under New York City. She can't remember its name, and she never saw any pictures, but the mental image she formed of it is what she's looking at now, down to the grand piano in the corner. Despite her fear, she steps out of the train. “Hello?” she whispers. This can't be right – it's an identical recreation of something that never existed in the first place.

She raises her eyes to the chandelier, painted red and gold like a faberge egg, but as she's congratulating herself on her good taste in 19th-century decoration, there's a high, clear sound and she jumps, spinning around before she even realizes it's the sound of a piano key being struck. The wiry old woman – maybe man – who struck it is resting one hand on the ivories, eyeing her.

“Where am I, really?” Laura asks them stupidly.

“Depends on who you ask. But for you, I'd say somewhere that you shouldn't be. If you'd like to stay, though...”

“No,” she says. “No, this is the right place and – and he sent me John – John Constantine sent me.” She delivers the whole thing staring straight at the piano keys. In her peripheral vision, she sees the figure stiffen and give a slow nod.

“Well, then... that's quite a name to conjure with.” They're looking down on her, and when she lifts her head, they give her a strange, distracted smile. “Too busy to come calling after all this time?”

Laura shrugs. She's starting to get her voice back now – not that the shock of the place's worn off, but she can at least make sense of its architecture. Enough to wonder if it's an otherworldly inkblot – you see what you want to see – or just this haggard, cheap-suited station attendant's way of messing with her. “He'd love to. That's what he said.”

The attendant nods slowly while she talks. It's hard to tell whether they're listening at all, until Laura stops and they press down one of the black keys so softly it barely makes a noise.

“I'd say he hasn't changed – as stupid as ever. But something has. I wasn't sure he was even still alive. Time was, his luck wouldn't have run out like that – or if it had, he'd have known what to do.” They give a short roll of the eyes. “But at least he's got _you_.”

Laura's face stings. “It isn't... that's not it. I'm just the messenger.” She lifts one copy of _X-Ray Hellions_ – now wrapped in butcher paper – from her purse. “He said it's sympathetic – ”

“You said that already.” They take the package and peel its tape, hands somehow much younger-looking that the rest of them. That's not how it's supposed to work, is it? Laura muses on that so she won't have to think about how pathetically confused she feels.

“Is it yours?”

“Is what?”

“The book. I'm surprised you could find two copies of this trash. Can I see the other?”

Laura lets the attendant compare them, which they do, carefully.

“And so here we are, then... quite sympathetic, indeed.”

“So...”

The attendant sets the book on the piano. “Tell Constantine his girl's a lot more creative with her architecture than he is. And that the answer's yes. But I won't be there when he gets in.”

Laura hears something mechanical in the distance. The station is cold, and the attendant is playing a little five-key tune. “Who are you, anyways?” she asks.

The train screams into the station, and the attendant waits quietly. Laura's not sure they even heard the question. But as she gets on, they flick a final key on the piano.

“Depends on who you ask,” they say. “Nobody really remembers old places, once they're gone. Just what they want them to look like. But, you know – ” they grin, and Laura sees that their mouth is wide and their teeth are sharp. “We remember them.” Then the doors are closing, but Laura jumps out before they can trap her in.

“Wait,” she says. “I'll need your help too.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I... I'm not going to lie, I sort of want _X-Ray Hellions_ to actually exist.


	11. Rose

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _“You_ feel _of him. Your thoughts are rotten with it.”_

“Hey there,” she says to Benny the next afternoon, clutching her purse and trying to hide her exhaustion. He gives her a strange look, and she wraps her arms around the mismatched, layered shirt and sweater she put on to keep out the lingering chill that never quite went away after last night's ride. “I thought trash fashion was in now,” she says. “Anyways, I'm not here to be judged...”

The most beautiful woman she's ever seen – maybe not ever, but in a long time – has walked into the club. It's mostly her hair, a cloud of black curls that somehow manages to not be frizzy or shapeless, topped by a jaunty hat that reminds Laura of suffragettes in dress suits. She'd be memorable no matter what, but the leg cements it: it flows normally to mid-calf, then retreats suddenly into a narrow, whittled thing, some entirely inadequate prosthesis that she supplements with a cane. Above the leg but below the hat, her eyes are lined with great black sweeps. There's a man behind her, but although he'd impress her anywhere else, alongside the woman he's merely pretty.

Laura knows, without a doubt, that this is Rose. And she knows, without a doubt, that Rose is magic. It is, understandably, hard to put her finger on why, but she radiates something unworldly that Laura doesn't particularly like – if she's going to be dramatic, there's a friction to it, like the ugly feeling of rubbing velvet the wrong way.

Rose takes Benny aside and asks him something; Laura doesn't hear it, but she sees Benny nod obsequiously. Then she almost jumps, because Rose has turned and looked right into Laura's eyes. The strange, invasive feeling gets worse. “Hello there,” she says, approaching smoothly on her mismatched legs.

Laura nods. “Hello.”

Rose tries another pleasantry or two, but they're all forced. Laura just hopes she'll leave her alone – there's no chance of seeing John today, not now. But Rose has drawn close and put an arm around Laura's shoulder. “Over there,” she says, “he was telling me you're a magic enthusiast.” Laura makes a noise she hopes is noncommittal. “He said you've been... learning from our friend downstairs. Which I think is a little sad, because he's just so bloody awful at it.”

Laura's mind jumps to crime dramas, where the cops get you to talk by pretending they know everything. Except that there's no reason Benny shouldn't have told her. “Well come on, what's there to it?” she asks. “Mark some cards, get fast with some quarters. Learn to distract people.”

Rose opens her mouth, closes it again. Then she throws up her hands in mock frustration, cane dangling from thumb and forefinger. “Well, listen to that! You've got it all down!” Then she smiles, teeth showing. The velvet feel gets stronger. “Let's go down and celebrate with him. After all,” she says, “You two've had a bit of a celebration already, haven't you?”

Laura tries to keep her voice light. “What, Benny's been making up stories?”

Rose keeps smiling. “You _feel_ of him,” she says. “Your thoughts are rotten with it.”

Laura nods. She doesn't dare break contact with Rose, who leads her down the stairs and through the salon with unnerving steadiness given her injury, leaving the man behind. She unlocks the door to John's cell and steps back. “Go ahead. It's your last time, you might as well.”

She opens the door and is surprised to see John waiting at the table, hunched over but looking straight at her in shock. “No,” he says. “You can't – leave now. Leave right away.” She shakes her head, tilting it back towards the door and Rose. He nods, and she can see him tense. “Come on in, Rose,” he calls. “I'm harmless, I promise.”

Rose sits at the table across from him, leaving Laura standing awkwardly to one side. Neither of them is looking at her, and suddenly she's horribly jealous. She's got an extra foot on Rose, but that's all she can claim. And no matter how much they hate each other, she's still got to have known him for years. They do hate each other, though. Or John, at least, hates her; he'll barely meet her eyes. Rose is radiating a strange combination of predatory hunger and sadness. Laura hates being able to know this. She wonders how much Rose can tell about her feelings in turn – if she knows about the book in her purse and the blood-spotted stems placed carefully, invisibly along the edges of the room.

“Made a nice match, have you?”

“Rose --”

She cuts him off. “Don't worry. I know you're not exactly a virgin twice removed. But does she, Johnny?” He doesn't answer, and she continues. “Does she know who you really belong to?”

He clears his throat. “I fancy she can hazard a guess.”

“You know what I told you before, Johnny?”

“That I'm funny?”

“Yes.” She's on her feet, gone to the other side of the table, hand stroking the back of John's neck. She bites at his ear. He shakes his head.

“Please,” he says. “Please, not in front of her.”

She rubs his shoulders playfully and starts undoing the buttons on his shirt. The sleeve catches on his splinted arm and Rose pulls, drawing a cry from him. He wraps his good arm across his chest, as if trying to protect himself. “Oh, come on,” she says. “When did you start getting modest?”

John looks Rose in the eye again, and this time Laura can feel him too somehow, desperate and humiliated. “Please, Rose, I'm begging you. Send her outside, and I'll do whatever you want. You can make me – you can make me do anything, she'll hear it, just...”

Rose takes his head in both hands and touches her fingers to his skin. She doesn't chant, doesn't do anything a lover wouldn't, but something in John's face changes when he looks up. He seems dazed, drunk, when he takes Rose's hand in his and stands and kisses her.

Laura swallows. She'd beg Rose too if she thought it would do any good, but this is just life now, surreal and full of miserable people hurting other miserable people. Rose radiates sadness even as she lets John kiss her neck and undo her dress and kneel in front of her; her eyes are years away, and Laura wonders what else her life holds, this beautiful, horrible woman. Does she go home and forget about the man she's left for other people to brutalize? Or does it dig at her like a burr no matter where she is, this hatred?

John is naked now, and he starts to slide Rose's dress off her shoulders. She slaps him, and as he stumbles back, surprised, she sweeps her cane across his knees. He collapses, and she hits him again, the wood landing with a dull pillowy sound across his side. But he doesn't back away, he gets up again, slowly, and tries to kiss her, saying he's sorry, he's so sorry. This time the cane hits his arm, and he cries out. Please, he asks her. Please touch me. Please don't hurt me. I'm yours. I was always yours.

Laura tries to remember that it's not the man she knows who's begging Rose to take him. But the jealousy snakes up again. They're two beautiful people, she and he, her dark and him light, arms around each other as he helps her sink to the floor. If something hadn't happened between them – if Rose didn't broadcast this loss – he'd still have her. Laura is a mistake, an afterthought who happened to be around to soak up John's pain and isolation.

Her legs are wrapped around him, and she's thrown her head back, eyes closed – yes, she says. Yes. I missed you, Johnny.

Laura clutches her purse in one hand and raises the other to her face, using one finger to dam up the tears. She slams the door to the spare bathroom and avoids her reflection – ugly, now – as she turns on the faucet and cups water to her eyes. One can't let them collect salt. They get irritated. They look puffy and unattractive, not like Rose's smoky, melancholy cat eyes. She can still hear her and feel her, that velvet feel, now beyond sadness or hunger – only white noise.

Laura looks up. She leaves the faucet on and snaps her purse open. In its paper wrap, the book slides neatly between the sink and the first bend of the drain, half-hidden by a flimsy wooden cabinet. She feels the sink to make sure it's not where it could get wet and checks the stems in the corner of the room as an afterthought, making sure they're still there. They are. Just as quietly as she opened it, she closes her purse and the cabinet door, masking the noise with a sob and rubbing her eyes to keep them wet and red, not that they need much help.

Learn to distract people, that's all there is to it. Because maybe that bastard Rose can read minds, but she can't read them all the time. And Laura is going to make damned sure she doesn't get the chance to hurt John, body or mind, ever again.


	12. Station 151

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _If you'd let me, I could have done more. But you didn't want that, did you? You wanted to nurse your hate. You'd rather we both suffered._

It would be bad enough if there was just a gap in his memory, but she makes him remember all of it with perfect clarity, seeing himself kneel at her foot begging like a beaten dog. He remembers wanting Rose pathetically, being able to think of nothing else, even as he saw Laura watching them. He remembers her slamming the cell door open and leaving, but only peripherally. And then he comes back to himself and wonders where she's gone, if she'll be back. Knowing that Rose won't let her.

Rose has gotten to her feet with the cane and buttoned her dress, and she looks John up and down while he pulls clothes on as quickly as he can, face burning with anger and embarrassment.

“What the _hell_ is wrong with you?”

Rose raises an eyebrow. “Nothing. I feel quite good, actually. For a cripple.”

“No,” he says. “Stop it. Stop it! We knew what we were doing! I didn't drag you into it. I was just luckier, and if I'd been able to find you... Well, I looked, and I didn't look hard enough, and... and I'm sorry.”

“'Sorry' doesn't mean anything.”

“If you'd let me, I could have done more. We could have fixed it, probably – enough gods, enough demons, and who knows? But you didn't want that, did you? You wanted to nurse your hate. You'd rather we both suffered.”

“I want to save people from you.”

“Yeah, well, she who fights monsters... if anybody's dangerous now, it's you.”

The makeup on one eye has smudged, making her face lopsided. No matter what she does to him, he'll always wish the Rose he remembered had come back – the one who laughed without malice, the one who loved him. He used to be able to see it if he looked hard enough, but now it won't fit any more. She's just going to be the one who took her pain out on him and used him like he was nothing.

Rose lifts his head for a goodbye kiss, and he doesn't fight her. She's done the worst she can, and even if she doesn't seem to have noticed the mimicking he had Laura cast, it's not as though Laura is coming back with the book. Not bloody likely she'd come back even if she could after watching him swear his love to another woman, taking whatever she did to him just to be close to her.

He strips his clothes off as soon as Rose is gone and stands in the shower, faintly registering that the water is freezing cold. He doesn't mind, welcomes the pain. His arm still hurts, but that feels natural now, like it's never been any other way – he wonders if Rose feels as though her leg's always been shortened now. They talk about phantom limbs, but in the course of things people don't usually seem to be able to truly miss things for very long. For a while you do – you look for a window and find only wall, keep waiting for somebody to come take you out for a pint and tell you the whole thing's an ugly joke. But after a while it's only the idea of a loss, something you wish you really missed. Then you wish you could remember the things you missed at all, because they're just not part of your reality any more.

The water's so cold his skin is burning. He feels Rose pulling off his shirt, the sharp pain of his arm, the smooth floor as she hit him. He feels the reality of his situation settle around him like dust: there is only one way out, and he can't make himself take it.

He hits the wall as hard as he can, feeling the water flow over his fist. Stepping out of the water, he hits it again, knuckles scratching and then, as he keeps going, bleeding. He doesn't care. He wants to hurt something, even if it's just himself and some brick, wants to feel like he's got some modicum of control. “Why?” he yells. “Why couldn't you have found her before she found you? Why couldn't you have made her see sense? I'll tell you – you're a brainless, short-sighted git who can't get up once he's been knocked down. Somebody isn't impressed enough by your reputation to stay at arm's length, you don't even know what to do.”

But he can't move his other arm and he can't balance, and as he tries to smash the flimsy door he falls back instead. It doesn't matter, he thinks dimly. He hurt the floor, he has to believe he hurt it. He turns slowly onto his side, wincing and propping himself up with his good arm. It's then, looking up at the sink, that he sees the package.

He doesn't let himself hope as he plucks it from beneath the sink, but when he's dried himself and set it on the desk outside, loosening the tape carefully, he knows. A cheap paperback, published 1965 and read carefully, over and over, by the girl who'd drawn the elaborate knot on the frontispiece and written the inscription on the back page: _Dear Hellions_ , it had said when she showed it to him on one copy, then the other. _Find enclosed the solution to your shortage of virile futurion men. Love, Anno Erotica._ Laura had balked at writing it, even unaware of exactly how deep Rose's cruelty towards him went. But he wants to pretend things are like they were before, when capture by a beautiful woman wasn't more than a softcore fantasy. When sex was something he could think about as more than a knife at his throat.

Some things don't like asymmetry. When they're unique enough, they need to make sure there's nothing too amiss around them. They sense two of the same man in the room, one of whom shouldn't be - they don't know the other is only an illusion. If things go right, they'll do what they can to restore the balance. While he dresses, he prays the other copy is somewhere he wants to be. Then he kneels on the floor and opens it to the dog-eared 151st page.

He's always known it was possible, but it's different to actually do it – especially when it's the first magic he's had a hand in since Rose's reappearance, and the brand. He could cry with relief, and everything is fading, and when he can see again he's looking at the other copy of the book on a freezing cement floor, under a brick arch discolored by rust and mildew. An abandoned underground station, ugly as ever and not really of this world. Somewhere no one, unless they know where he's gone, can follow him. There's no more asymmetry to exploit; as a final caution, he tugs the title page out and crumples it, tossing it onto the tracks and severing the last connection between the two books. As to the rest of it, well, the girl on the cover looks rather nice.

He nearly tears Laura's inscription out as well. For all he knows, Rose will go after her instead – she'll know he had to have help. And then he'll have put a new victim in the path of his old one, before he even left the room. That's what he does, after all. He's just too drained to feel bad about it right now. Even if she ends up all right, seeing her will just remind him of his captivity. All those reasons, though, and he can't quite do it. Nor can he stop himself from picking up the paper she must have left under the book when she placed it.

*  
_  
Dear John, which is a funny thing to write to somebody:_

_I assume there's a lot you're not telling me about this plan, like who Rose is; I don't even know what she looks like right now, which is going to make it fun if she finds out who_ I _am. That's another thing I assume you're not telling me: what happens when she finds out you're gone? I'm beginning to see why some people don't like you. Although what she did – I keep hoping I do see her, because I've never wanted to hurt anybody so much._

_So I'm going far, far away for a while, once I deliver the other copy. Apparently that's where these stations will take me – not that I have a lot of choice. If you want to be melodramatic, you can figure I might miss seeing anybody I know, maybe ever again. But I don't feel so bad about it yet. If it's at all like what I've seen here, I've at least got scenery ahead of me. And if you're reading this, it means I made my delivery and this whole confusing thing worked. Just do one thing for me: stay safe. I want to feel like this wasn't all for nothing._

_I am going to miss you. I'm going to be living in a world I don't understand now, and I hope I'm smart enough to figure out what the hell is going on. Anyways, I'm sure you can find me if you want, once everything's fixed. Everything can be fixed, right? I wouldn't mind seeing you._

_Much love,_

_Laura_

_P.S. Don't throw out the book if you can avoid it. It's actually pretty good, and I don't know how many copies there are out there. And if we meet up again, somehow, you can guess which one of the girls I want to be._


End file.
